This confirmed what I’d been suspecting: Mendelsund is a tremendously strong, intuitive designer. Please avoid this book.When I finished writing The Flame Alphabet, Tom McCarthy’s novel C had just come out, with a dazzling jacket by Peter Mendelsund. 4) There is no antagonist that must be overcome. The lack of meaningful relationships between characters means you don't care what happens to any of them, thus there is no tense climax that you are so anticipating that you remove all distractions so you can't miss! 3) there is no solution or closure at the end of the book. Do you what a story without meaningful relationships is? That's right, boring! The main character goes 11 long hours without any meaningful connection with any other character in the book! That results in 2) You don't care about the characters. Do you realize what that does? It eliminates the primary foundation for meaningful relationships. 1) The main theme is pain from verbal communication. This book attracted me with the synopsis because it was an interesting idea (might be enjoyable to someone who studies languages and communication), but the entire story is problematic and missing some essential ingredients to make an enjoyable read. I have almost 50 books in my library and this is in the worst 5. Not worth a credit knowing what I know now. If you are depressed when you start reading this book, it will only make you more depressed. I was disappointed that such a promising concept could be rendered as such a dud. What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment? This element might be the only thing that buoyed me through the story. At these moments, the text gives him an opportunity to use his voice to express the narrator's bitter frustration.

There are a few moments of gallows humor in the novel that Andy Paris handles well.

What did you like about the performance? What did you dislike? What do you think your next listen will be? In the end, I didn't care about anyone or anything in the novel. Nearly all the characters stop speaking to each other, per the major plot point of the novel, so the reader is mostly left with the protagonist's/narrator's lengthy ruminations about existing in a world in which language - written or spoken - is deadly poison (irony?). The protagonist struggles to make sense of it all, but gets nowhere as he and his family literally and figuratively fall apart. Lots of dreary descriptions of the sick getting sicker but not dying too fast and civilization crumbling but not quite coming to an end. The early chapters were promising, but as the story progresses it all sinks into a sludge of alienation that would probably even bum Kafka out. What disappointed you about The Flame Alphabet?

The flame alphabet